Events

The Work of Friendship: Nurturing Manhood in the Great Migration

ELSA BARKLEY BROWN

Associate Professor, Departments of History and Women's Studies, University of Maryland

Professor Barkley Brown is associate professor of history and women’s studies, affiliate faculty in African American Studiesand American Studies at the University of Maryland. She isco-editor of the two-volume Major Problems in African-American History (2000) and the two-volume Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1993). Her articles have appeared in Signs, Feminist Studies, History Workshop, Sage, Public Culture, and The Journal of Urban History. She has twice been awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Publication Prize for best article in African-American Women's History. She has also won the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best article in southern women's history, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Prize for best article in African-American History, and the Anna Julia Cooper Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Black Women's Studies. A past president of the Southern Association for Women Historians, Professor Barkley Brown currently serves on the executive council of the Southern Historical Association and the editorial boards of The Journal of Women's History and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

The Work of Friendship: Nurturing Manhood in the Great Migration

"The Work of Friendship: Nurturing Manhood in the Great Migration” explores the understandings and practices of manhood in early twentieth century African American life and culture. I do so by examining the social networks of a specific group of working class men as these networks and the work of creating and maintaining them reflected their expectations of each other and help us understand what they thought it meant to be a friend. I argue for the importance of situating discussions of African American manhood in specific historical and cultural context and the necessity of separating our understandings of African American men’s lived experiences from both black and white public discourse about masculinity and manhood.